Hugging Face: The AI Global Commons

The Ollama Model Registry is fantastic, but it is a curated "subset" of the AI world. If you want the absolute cutting edge—the models released yesterday by researchers in Tokyo or Berlin—you need to go to Hugging Face.

1. What is Hugging Face?

Hugging Face (specifically "The Hub") is the GitHub of AI. It currently hosts over 1,000,000 models.

• Developers: Share their training results.
• Companies: (Meta, Google, Microsoft) release their "Open Weights" models here first.
• Researchers: Publish experimental architectures.

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2. The Model Hub vs. The Ollama Registry

Feature	Ollama Registry	Hugging Face Hub
Selection	Hundreds of models	Millions of models
Ease of Use	1-Click (ollama run)	Requires manual download/conversion
Format	Only GGUF	All formats (SafeTensors, PyTorch, Jax)
Purpose	Running/Using	Research/Training/Storage

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3. Navigating the Hub

To find a model for Ollama, you go to huggingface.co/models.

The Filters

On the left sidebar, look for these critical filters:

• Task: Usually "Text Generation."
• Library: Look for "GGUF".

If a model on Hugging Face is already in GGUF format, you can "bridge" it into Ollama in under 60 seconds (which we will do in Lesson 4).

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4. Understanding Repositories

A Hugging Face repository looks like TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-Chat-GGUF.

• TheBloke: The username of the person who uploaded/converted it.
• Llama-2-7B-Chat: The name of the model.
• GGUF: The format.

Inside the "Files and versions" tab, you will see a list of files like llama-2-7b.Q4_K_M.gguf. This is the specific "Flavor" of the model you have to choose to download.

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Key Takeaways

• Hugging Face is the world's largest repository of AI models.
• Most models on Hugging Face are in "Raw" formats (not ready for Ollama).
• You search for GGUF models to find files that can be easily pulled into your local environment.
• Hugging Face provides models that are too specialized or too new to be in the main Ollama registry.